by Allison Rimm | 11:00 AM November 26, 2013
Even though the people in your unit are overstretched, scarred by the budget ax, and sick to death of change, you’re about to present them with a wrenching new challenge.
It’s your job to get them excited about it. What’s your plan?
I have a story about just such a situation, and, oddly enough, a dress made out of birdseed figures prominently in it. But before I get into that, consider how prevalent this situation is—how often you’ve had to go to your change-weary employees and ask them to dig deep yet again.
Motivating people is difficult under the best of circumstances: As Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace survey showed, 70% of U.S. employees aren’t engaged at work, a statistic that has not budged much in a decade. Regardless of your industry, if you poll your team, you’ll likely find that they’re feeling overtaxed, and that their “joy quotient” at work is seriously down. But it gets even harder when employees have already faced a series of crises, as is the case with so many workers today (those lucky enough to still have jobs). Just as they’re getting used to doing more with less, you have to motivate them to throw themselves heart and soul into a critically important new initiative.
I keep thinking of the health-care IT professionals I’ve worked with for much of my career and how they must be dreading the long, rough road that lies ahead for them. After years of cutbacks, the latest incarnation of health-care reform is putting intense new financial pressures on hospitals throughout the U.S. These organizations must make new investments, projected to be in the tens of billions of dollars, to implement electronic health records—and they have to find ways to save money at the same time. A lot of this will fall on the IT people.
A few years ago, I was in charge of strategic planning and IT when Massachusetts General Hospital was implementing the requirements of Massachusetts’ health-care reform, which became the model for the U.S. Affordable Care Act. After years of belt-tightening, there was little fat in the IT budget to cut, but new spending cuts were coming. If we waited for the annual budget cycle to come around, layoffs in the IT department would be inevitable. So it was imperative that we make thoughtful changes to preserve service levels, avoid layoffs, and maintain employee morale during the hard times that were surely ahead.
With time to plan, we knew we needed to engage the staff in thinking creatively about how best to reorganize IT operations to optimize available resources. It was clear from the rich literature on motivation and from my own experience that employees would need five things:
- A solid understanding of the relevance of their work to the hospital’s mission.
- A chance to use their skills and expertise to make a positive contribution.
- More control over their work environment and their future.
- Opportunities to develop new friendships and interdisciplinary collaboration.
- New tools and the support necessary for their efforts to succeed.
My role was to be the catalyst that sparked the team’s creativity. At the first of two retreats, I confessed to being inspired by watching Project Runway with my teenage daughter. In case you don’t watch reality TV (really?), aspiring fashion designers on the show face challenges and someone is eliminated each week until the winner is crowned. In one episode, the designers had to make a couture creation solely out of materials they could get in a pet store. When I saw the incredible dress someone had made out of birdseed, I thought: There’s no limit to peoples’ creativity. Why couldn’t the IT staff design a beautiful future with the considerable resources it still had?
The IT Department traditionally worked in closed teams according to project or division. At that first retreat, we broke down those silos and created four teams, mixing people from all levels and corners of the organization. We described the challenge before them: continue to provide current (or improved) service levels, support all new health-reform-related initiatives, and propose budget cuts.
We invited two renowned physicians who were leading patient-care-redesign efforts to present their initiatives and talk about how IT was critical to the hospital’s mission. Next, an IT expert who had accomplished similar objectives in another industry presented tips and tools for our teams to consider. Finally, IT leaders stated that they were committed to implementing the best ideas. Thus armed, each team was assigned a mentor (à la Project Runway’s Tim Gunn) and given six weeks to find novel solutions.
At the second retreat, the groups presented their ideas. This was their opportunity to use the insights they’d gained from the front lines to show the suits how they could deliver patient-centered service more cost-effectively. Just as important, the group was highly energized. Although participation was voluntary, every person offered to serve on an implementation task force. This was extraordinary, considering how overburdened the staff had seemed at the outset of the endeavor. New friendships were formed and team members were excited to see their ideas put into action.
The immediate benefits were considerable. We met the first objective of avoiding layoffs and ill-advised cuts in the next budget cycle. Staff members were gratified to have had a say in how spending cuts would be made, particularly since they knew they’d have to live with the consequences of the choices.
I recently caught up with Keith Jennings, the current CIO, to see if some of the longer-term initiatives had achieved the intended results. The most promising idea—our birdseed-dress equivalent—had been to create a centralized testing and training resource to serve all software installations, so that those functions wouldn’t have to be replicated for every application. It had an outcome we could not have predicted at the time, because the scale at the hospital was insufficient to realize significant efficiencies in the two-year period we had set for the project. However, now that Partners Healthcare, of which the hospital is a member institution, is implementing electronic health records across the entire system, it’s possible to achieve economies on a much larger scale. Though it has taken longer than we’d expected, the groundwork that group laid six years ago helped set the stage for greater savings than we could have imagined when we focused on Massachusetts General alone.
So here’s your plan. It’s pretty simple, actually: Energize your exhausted employees by showing them how essential their work is to the organization’s mission, giving them a structured opportunity to contribute, supporting their efforts to innovate, and committing to implementing their best ideas. Don’t underestimate the value of giving people the chance to develop initiatives that improve the quality of their work lives and to address problems that have been vexing them for years.
It takes time for managers to learn what’s on the minds of their team members, but the return on that investment may well mean getting a stronger product and a more enduring commitment to achieving great results over the long term.
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